When the artist Ruth Laskey began her latest weaving series, she was well aware that it would be a whole year before she saw the finished product. That is by design: Her process is methodical, every step deliberate. Once she settles on the design for each new piece in a series, she hand-dyes, dries, and measures her threads, then strings them up on the pegs of a warping board inside her San Francisco studio. Only then does she start on the loom, slowly weaving the reverse of each image, thread by thread. It’s not until the whole series is complete that the bolt of linen is cut from the loom, flipped over, and seen face-up for the first time.
“I like how slow it all is,” she says. “There’s not much that’s slow.”
Laskey has been working this way for 20 years. She originally trained as a painter, and first tried weaving in order to make her own linen canvases—a way to pump the brakes on what was otherwise, for her, too speedy an art form. She realized weaving itself was her calling, so she bought an old loom off Craigslist and, in 2005, began her Twill series, an ongoing collection of exquisitely plaited, abstract textiles made by the same considered process.
Loops, from 2023, is the latest member of the Twill family. Those works, together with her Circles series, from 2022, are on view in a new show at San Francisco’s Altman Siegel, Laskey’s debut with the gallery, through April 20. The exhibition intersperses the eight Loops and seven Circles, placing them in conversation. “I like the dialogue that’s happening,” Laskey says. “There’s a really nice rhythm between the two bodies of work.”